As CNN’s Sara Murray reported yesterday, the National Rifle Association is bracing for the strong possibility that it will be investigated over its ties to Russian financier Алекса́ндр Порфи́рьевич То́ршин (Alexander Torshin), one of the seventeen prominent Russian government officials whom Donald Trump’s Treasury Department recently slapped with sanctions, despite his bromance with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin (влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин)(https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/27/politics/nra-documents-russian-banker/index.html).
Torshin is a leading figure in Putin’s United Russia Party (Еди́ная Росси́я).
The NRA has said it is reexamining, in the wake of the sanctions, its relationship with Torshin, who, as a Russian subject of Putin, is a lifetime NRA member.
There have been accusations that Torshin is a leading figure within the Russian mafia (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/donald-trump-russia-gangster-washington-dc-meeting-cancelled-claims-a7664701.html;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleksandr_Torshin#cite_note-Independent-2).
Murray’s article is a must read for all who would like to know how one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the US penetrates its octopus-like tentacles wherever it sees an opening.
The NRA shelled out more than $30,000,000 in 2016 to support Trump, and Trump’s lackey Mike Pence will speak at the NRA’s annual convention in Dallas on Friday.
The NRA is alive and well in part because of the Supreme Court’s wrongly decided 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 579 (2008), authored by the late Justice Antonin Scalia. Scalia said (read: argued) that the Second Amendment "guarantees an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that [fire]arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
Scalia’s opinion stood the Second Amendment on its head. Trump wants to replace the First Amendment with the Second Amendment, and he would also like to ban all media outlets except Fox News and Fox and Friends.
As associate solitary reporter Kirk Coleman watched, the NRA’s top gunslinger, Wayne LaPierre, boarded one of its numerous small planes, which flew him in the middle of the night, under the radar, to St. John’s International Airport in Newfoundland, where he changed planes and boarded an Aeroflot A350, which flew him directly to Moscow. There, he was warmly greeted by Torshin who, in turn, took him directly to Putin, as observed by our Moscow-based associate solitary reporter, Foma Kheroschonski (ФОМА КЕРОШАНСКИЙ).
After Putin poured an inordinate amount of vodka into LaPierre, he embraced him and granted him political asylum, and sent him to an undisclosed location, where he is sharing a room with Edward Snowden.
Russia (and many other sovereign nations) has no treaty with the United States providing for extradition.
LaPierre told Kheroshchonski that he feels much safer in Moscow, but he is furious that Putin made him room with Snowden.